The increasing popularity of media consumer devices has created new opportunities and challenges for the creators and distributors of media content for playback on those devices, as well as for the designers and manufacturers of the devices. Many consumer devices are capable of playing back a broad range of media content types and formats including those often associated with high-quality, wide bandwidth and wide dynamic range audio content for HDTV, Blu-ray or DVD. Media processing devices may be used to play back this type of audio content either on their own internal acoustic transducers or on external transducers such as headphones or high quality home theater systems; however, all these playback systems and environment pose significantly different requirements on the dynamic range of the audio signal due to varying noise levels in the environment or due to the limited capability of the playback system to reproduce the required sound pressure levels without distortion. Limiting the dynamic range depending on the environment is an approach to provide high quality and intelligibility across a broad range of different rendering devices having different rendering capabilities and listening environments, i.e. across a broad range of rendering modes.
The present document addresses the technical problem of providing creators and distributors of media content with bandwidth efficient means for enabling the reproduction of audio signals at high quality and intelligibility on a broad range of different rendering devices having different rendering capabilities.